To stay abreast of current supply-market pricing, it is common for procurement managers to frequently organize auctions among a pool of qualified suppliers (the supply base). Sole awards can alienate losing suppliers and cause them to defect from the supply base. To maintain the supply base and...

We investigate procurement in a setting in which the buyer is bound by sourcing rules. Sourcing rules may limit the minimum and maximum amounts of business that can be awarded to a single supplier or dictate the minimum number of suppliers who are awarded business, thus necessitating split...

A buyer seeking to outsource production may be able to find ways to reduce a potential supplier's cost, e.g., by suggesting improvements to the supplier's proposed production methods. We study how a buyer could use such "cost reduction investigations" by proposing a three-step supplier selection...

In this paper, we empirically examine the impact of performance feedback on the outcome of crowdsourcing contests. We develop a dynamic structural model to capture the economic processes that drive contest participants' behavior, and estimate the model using a rich data set about real online...

We study a buyer's strategic use of a dual-sourcing option when facing suppliers possessing private information about their disruption likelihood. We solve for the buyer's optimal procurement contract. We show that the optimal contract can be interpreted as the buyer choosing between...

We study a manufacturer that faces a supplier privileged with private information about supply disruptions. We investigate how risk-management strategies of the manufacturer change, and examine whether risk-management tools are more, or less, valuable, in the presence of such asymmetric...

In theory, combinatorial auctions can provide significant benefits in many real-world applications, such as truckload procurement. In practice, however, the use of such auctions has been greatly limited by the need for bidders to bid on an exponential number of bundles and for the auctioneer to...